Time and Faraway Space
by Queen
Summary: Star Wars/Doctor Who. Four thousand years ago, a warning was carved in stone and left for a Padawan to find. While Ahsoka works towards deciphering the ancient carvings that bear her name, a mad man with a blue box appears, just as the galaxy begins to fly to pieces...


_Time and Faraway Space_

* * *

Prologue.

* * *

The chamber was empty, save for two.

Master Yoda and Master Ti each sat in their respective seats, heads bowed. Beyond them, Coruscant saw midday, the sky bright with sunlight touched cirrus and the faintest blur of smog on the far blue horizon. The light slanted through the tall windows that encircled the Council chamber, pooling on the patterned floor and making long rectangles of warmth around the edge of the room. The two Masters glanced up at her entrance, sunlight streaming past the curves of high montrals and long, curving ears, casting them into highlight. Their expressions were strangely neutral, though not without a certain appearance of thoughtfulness and concern.

Ahsoka walked carefully, ignoring the faint tingles in her right leg; she had one last muscle regeneration therapy scheduled with the Healers for this afternoon. Her nerves were healed, but still a little raw, twinging when she pushed them too hard, as she'd been a few minutes ago in the practice rooms, before being summoned here. She kept her steps steady, regular, her face calm but with a little bit of hope. She felt mostly back to normal; the headaches had finally stopped a week ago, and her speed and physical strength were nearly what they were before the explosion she'd found herself caught up in.

She didn't get called to the Council chamber too often. Considering she hadn't been in trouble recently, the most likely explanation was a mission assignment. They probably weren't going to send her back to the Outer Rim, the sieges, the front line, and Master Skywalker, but they might have a smaller job for her. At least, so she hoped. Anything was better than hanging out here, too wounded for serious battle but too healthy to be happy sitting around while everyone else was out fighting and risking their lives without her.

In the center of the ring of almost-empty chairs, she came to a stop and bowed her head in respectful acknowledgement. "Masters."

Their neutral expressions softened into looks more of sympathy, and Master Yoda asked, "Continues well, your recuperation does, Padawan Tano?"

It was a polite question, for someone who'd spent nearly a week in bacta and the weeks following in physical therapy, but considering the fact she was a Jedi and there was a war on, it was also a request for a capability assessment. She felt her hope notch up a little higher that she was about to be cut loose from the Healers. "Yes, Master. I'm feeling a lot better." Ahsoka smiled and made a faint gesture towards her lightsabers. "It's good to get some practice in without falling on my face every five minutes."

That garnered a pair of faint smiles that faded entirely too quickly for Ahsoka's liking. There was something odd in the way they were looking at her, a little puzzled and ever so slightly wary. That was definitely strange coming from two of the most powerful Jedi in the Order, directed at a Padawan. Ahsoka's smile faltered, and her lekku twitched uncertainly; in response, Master Ti's resettled themselves, flexing outward and then back, in a gesture of reassurance and calm. Whatever was going on, she wasn't in trouble it seemed. But something had the two Masters unsettled, and it involved her.

Master Yoda leaned forward, hands curling around his knees. "Again, we would hear, your impressions of the planet Meioh."

Startled, Ahsoka shifted her attention from Master Ti to Master Yoda, before glancing back to the other Togruta for another flicker of reassurance from her lekku, accompanied by a small, encouraging smile and a tilt forward of the head.

_Meioh_. It was just over three months since she'd left that bizarre planet. The 501st had been dispatched there under the impression that the Separatists were testing a strange new weapon on the small world, but what they found, instead, were some sort of oily creatures bubbling up from the planet's core and devouring everything they could find.

If it hadn't been for the Doctor….

Master Yoda's face grew grave, brows drawing down as she looked at him. The Doctor. He had appeared out of nowhere, talking a mile a minute and giving everyone orders - a fact that didn't sit well with Master Skywalker. Still, he'd saved them all, and likely the planet as well, considering he was the one to shut all the mining equipment down – apparently those oil things were sentient, and didn't appreciate having people drilling down into their homes.

He wasn't human. He _looked_ human. Even acted human, sort of, but she'd never seen such a powerful current of the Force concentrated in or around one person before. Master Yoda came close. So did Master Skywalker, in a lot of ways. His Force presence was confusing, thrilling, and terrifying all at once – complimented all by the constant stream of half-sensical prattle flowing out of the man's mouth.

It was all in her mission report, though. And they were asking about the planet, not the impossible man.

"Safe enough as long as no one drills down again, I think." She frowned. Meioh was a mining world, but only for the last hundred years or so, after small deposits of chanlon were found in the planet's crust. The ore was rare, dense, and capable of producing an alloy that improved the total energy output of power cores. It was a valuable substance, and that made it hard to resist, even with the amount of destruction left in the wake of the oil-creatures' attacks. "Is someone drilling again?"

"Considering a return to activity, Meioh Mining is not." Master Yoda shook his head with a sigh. "Frightened, they are, but to recover some of what has been lost, they hope. Seeking survivors and equipment, the miners of Meioh have been. A discovery, near to the site of your battle, they have made."

"What kind of discovery?"

Master Yoda's gaze slid towards Master Ti, and Ahsoka turned towards her. Master Ti closed her eyes for a long moment, sighing before opening them. She leaned back into her chair, her hands resting gently on the seat's arms. "Meioh is deep in the Outer Rim, Padawan, and was only settled five hundred years ago by agriculturalist Selkath that care little for the land masses of Meioh or who mines them for minerals. Mining has only been ongoing for approximately a hundred years. The planet was largely unexplored prior to the colonization of the Selkath or the mining company." Master Ti's lips pursed together and the tips of her lekku twitched in consternation as she considered her next words. "Approximately two kilometers from the site of your encounter with the subterranean creatures, miners found a series of deeply cut carvings in the face of a cliff."

Master Ti's eyes lowered, and she leaned forward, placing her elbows on her knees and her chin in her laced fingers. "Only a few words were discernible through the holos that we were sent, between the carvings' deterioration and the poor image resolution of the imagery. Without proper scans, it's hard to determine an exact date for when they were made, but estimates based on the climate and level of physical deterioration approximate the carvings somewhere between six and four thousand years old, long before the planet was originally discovered and surveyed. They appear to have been made with either a high powered laser or a lightsaber. The language is Old High Togruti."

Master Ti touched a button on the control panel of her chair, and a blue-tinted projection filled the room, the holo emitters curving the image so that it wrapped around the circle of the Council chamber, just before the empty seats and clashing with the bright backdrop of noontime Coruscant. The holoimage resolution was, as Master Ti said, poor. The carvings, cut into uneven rock, appeared grainy and shadowed. The moss and foliage around them appeared pixilated and splotchy.

Ahsoka reached out a hand and began to trace her fingers through some of the swirls and strikes of what were supposed to be words. She wasn't a historian and didn't know a lot about the history of the Togruti language, but Old High Togruti hadn't been spoken in millennia, and even then, it was supposed to be reserved for formal occasions. It was a dead language. There was no reason for it to be carved into a cliff on a small planet in the Outer Rim before it was even discovered.

Some of the characters were just barely legible, and Ahsoka paused before them. They were reminiscent of Modern Togruti in shape and form, but blurred due to age and deterioration. There were probably some scholars and archeologists on Shili who would love to get their hands on this, but beyond it being close to the location they encountered the oil creatures, she wasn't sure what it had to do with her. Perhaps she was being given a mission to protect some Togruta archeologists and linguists? That would make some sense since she'd been to the planet previously, had experience there with local threats, and could at least speak passable Modern Togruti.

She came to a stop and frowned at a boxy looking character, crossed through the center both horizontally and vertically, and her brows puckered. That was "_ta"_ – not as in "person" but as in "field" or "plain". There were an unfortunate number of homonyms in Togruti and it was one of the main challenges of learning to read the language. "Ta" could be either "person" – as in Togru-_ta_ – or a field or plain where most Togruta traditionally spent the majority of their lives. The people were linked to the land and vice versa.

"Ta" was an easier character to recognize; it was part of her name. Older characters and pronunciations were still used in the writing of names, to give them more meaning and a connection to the past. There were only a few dozen words of Old High Togruti still in use and most of them made up locations on Shili or personal names, including hers and Master Ti's. "Shaak Ti" was written as "language of the sacred force".

Her attention slid a little further to the right, where she could just make out the empty square that stood for "_no_" – open.

_Ta-no_. Open field. Her surname. Ahsoka took a step back, and shot an uncertain look towards Master Ti, whose face and lekku were inscrutable in expression, her face cast somewhat into shadow from the angle by which she leaned forward. A single flicker from Master Ti's right lek directed her back towards the image of the carvings.

Beside the two characters that construed "open field" were two more. Damage from time and weather made the characters difficult to make out, and the poor quality of the image resolution didn't help either. But sitting beside "ta-no" the shapes seemed remarkably familiar. Three small ovals, the bottom horizontal and the upper two vertical, appeared to be a rough sketch of eyes and a mouth, meaning "oneself". The second was a straight line with a curve arching above it, mimicking the appearance of a sun rising from the horizon, of light brightening the world, with a meaning of "reason". "Oneself" – "_ah_", "reason" – "_soka_". _Ah-soka_. Combined, they meant "freedom", since all people with reason, consciousness, sentience, sought to be free.

Tano Ahsoka. "_Freedom of the open field"_. Clan name followed by personal name, written as it was millennia ago, before Shili was united into one planetary government and tribal affiliation meant all.

"This is why we have summoned you here," came Master Ti's voice, low and rich in the silence of the room. Her grey eyes seemed to catch some measure of sunlight and gleam.

Then, slower, older, came Master Yoda's voice, and it was heavy. "Requesting you by name, this mystery is, Padawan Tano."

The projection of ancient words draped through the air, made slightly pale by the afternoon sunlight.

Thousands of years ago, her name was carved into the cliffs of the planet Meioh.

* * *

A man stood alone in an empty control room, and wondered at the galaxy about to take shape around him.

Empires rose and empires fell. Some were good and others…well, others not so much.

That was the way it always was. Oh, he could divert some of the bad things, stop the worst of it – can and had. So many times.

Empires rose and empires fell. This one would, just like all the others. It was the apotheosis of a thousand years of plotting and planning, but it was always meant to fall, one way or another, and quickly.

This particular galaxy seemed to breed heroes as rapidly as it did villains. He'd seen so many villains. Heroes, too.

They weren't supposed to be there. Well, not _then_, anyway. The Jedi girl and the clone. But they were there, like an afterthought, echoing down the timeline and crackling back again, their presence sending fissures down the walls of time and space as though someone had dealt them another blow. As though they'd crossed over from some other reality; from one alternate universe into another.

They weren't supposed to be there, and yet they were.

The future of the galaxy wibbled a bit.

They didn't _have_ to be there.

It stilled into a more familiar shape. Hm.

Two options: they die – or they get out of the way.

It would have been different, traveling with them. Warriors, both of them, armed with guns and laser swords and a mindset that saw killing as a part of life, even if a distasteful part. But they were clever, too, and brilliant. He could see it in the clone's steadiness and quick thinking, in the Jedi's selfless dedication and desire to protect at all odds. They would have been unlike any of his other companions, already knowing the extent of who they were, what they could do, how much power they really had.

No one stood on the opposite side of the TARDIS's control console, no one looked to him with excitement, waiting for the next stop, the next world, the next adventure, the next battle.

The space was empty. Rose was gone. Martha was gone on to her own life. Donna didn't even remember him anymore. He was alone, as he so often was - but with two people to help, and maybe a galaxy, too. It was better to move, to keep moving, to keep making a difference, than to keep remembering all that was lost, forgotten, locked forever behind the barriers between the worlds.

Standing at the console, the Doctor flipped a switch, turned a crank, pressed a few buttons…and the TARDIS began to move.

* * *

Hello all, and welcome to the new fic. As you can see, it's _Star Wars _and _Doctor Who_.

This prologue is being posted as a _**preview** _of my current project. It's my birthday so I thought I'd share. The rest of the story is still being worked on, so if you want updates when the rest of it goes live, be sure to favorite and follow, as there will definitely be more to come!

Also, big thank you's out to my beta, spikala, and to TheLightIsMine for the fantastic cover art!

In terms of the _Clone Wars_, this fic begins shortly before the Battle of Coruscant and the events of _Revenge of the Sith_. **It breaks off from TCW canon mid-season 5**, after the "Youngling Arc" and **before** the "Fugitive Ahsoka" finale arc.

In terms of _Doctor Who_, it takes place after _Journey's End_ but before _The_ _End of Time_ and _The Eleventh Hour_, so the Tenth Doctor is traveling on his own, post-Donna, but has not regenerated into Eleven yet.

For anyone who may be confused about Ahsoka knowing the Doctor, and the Doctor knowing Ahsoka and Rex, some time ago, I wrote a short story in my ficlet collection, _Smile_, involving Ahsoka and Rex briefly meeting the Doctor. The ficlet sparked off an idea for a full fledged crossover, and that is what this is. The Prologue takes place between the first and second halves of the _Smile_ ficlet – Chapter 1 will catch us up to the second half of the ficlet and move on from there.

All you really need to know is that Ahsoka and Rex had a short adventure with the Doctor on a planet named Meioh, there were oil monsters, and everyone ran for their lives a lot.

Anyone who knows where the name "Meioh" comes from and can tell me why I picked it gets a cookie!

I'm not super great at linguistics, but I'm basing some of the Togruti language off of Japanese, the only other language I know anything about, beside English (and its history). As far as I know, "Ahsoka Tano" has no official meaning, so I've settled on "freedom of the open field". "Tano" actually means "rice field" in Japanese, and is a pretty common surname, but since the Togruta don't strike me as rice farmers, I've dropped the "rice" meaning and switched it to "open". In Hindu mythology, "Shakti" is the goddess of divine creative power, and apparently the word means "to be able" or "sacred force or empowerment" in Sanskrit (thank you, Wikipedia!). I've adapted the meanings for the fic here.

And don't worry – the entire fic isn't full of language stuff.

Hope you all enjoy.

~Queen


End file.
